Confucianism and the linguistic mechanisms of citizenship in China: state recoding and grassroots rearticulation

This article examines the relationship between Confucianism and citizenship in contemporary China through the lens of linguistic mechanisms. Moving beyond normative debates over compatibility, it argues that Confucianism functions as a historically situated linguistic resource through which civicness is differentially constituted across regimes of discursive legitimacy. Drawing on three sets of materials – state discourse, long-term ethnographic research, and online exchanges within a grassroots Confucian education community – the study identifies two structurally asymmetric yet interconnected mechanisms: the language of citizenship and the language for citizenship. At the state level, Confucian ethics are incorporated into the authorised language of citizenship through moralisation and civilisational framing, recalibrating civic subjectivation while preserving the formal legal-institutional architecture of citizenship. At the grassroots level, actors increasingly mobilise Confucian vocabularies as a language for citizenship, enabling forms of civic articulation that remain publicly legible yet strategically indirect – what this article terms ‘civicness without naming’. By distinguishing between governmental moralisation and agentic moralisation, this study contributes to citizenship theory by showing how civic agency may be sustained and reconstituted through alternative linguistic repertoires under constrained conditions of speakability.